The most common mistake any company or individual can make when venturing out on a new website project is to assume that design is everything. I can assure you that your website’s design on its own is not what will make you successful.

A quality and professional web development service is what will affect the success of your site and its online objectives. High standards (above industry) are developed for a reason, and that is to ensure the product and service you receive is of paramount quality and to a professional level, so that your website will function as intended and provide the right return on investment.

Too many businesses that are relying on the success of their website to help drive their business will bypass the crucial step of dealing with a professional development company based on price.

In this article I will reveal 10 tips to choose the right development company and how it will better your project’s success.

10 Tips to Choose the Right Web Development Company

Track Record – Choose a company that has an established track record. Generally a web company that has more than 15+ websites that they have designed or developed in-house with case studies to show their achievements. Any qualifications or awards won will also help establish this.

Methodology – Ensure your chosen company has a strong web development methodology or process. This means that when your chosen company develops your website you can track the progress of your project and ensure all key quality standards are covered.

Usability – Design does play a heavy role in the development of your web project. Ensure the company you choose has strong visitor usability and user-friendly interaction knowledge. Usability is how visitors will interact with your website and how effectively they reach your end goal.

Development Team – The company you choose should have an in-house development team. Don’t use a company that is going to send your project work off to another country or other out-sourced web companies. You don’t want to be chasing an invisible rabbit down a hole should things be affected by an unforeseen event.

Design Team – Your web company ideally should have an in-house design team, unless you are dealing with another individual or company for design. This tip relates to tip 3, if your web company has a designer in-house this will better the success of the project as the development will mirror the design better and its objectives.

SEO – Choose a web development company that has an understanding of search engine optimization. Another important factor to any web projects success is making sure the company you deal with knows about SEO and how it will affect your website.

Social Media – Social media is a new form of marketing and can drive great results. Dealing with a web developer that understands this can help you drive better traffic and alternative forms of login.This tip applies to socially active websites and e-commerce based projects.

Content – Content is the biggest thing that pushes your website and draws in your visitors. Content will be the main thing that will sell your services or product, the company you deal with should have good development techniques to structure content effectively.

E-commerce – Choose a web development company that has e-commerce experience. E-commerce is fast becoming the biggest way to make money online, how your customers make payments is very important. Make sure you deal with a development company that can recommend and implement the best payment methods available.

Support – The most important tip to date, your development company must be able to support you as a customer and provide ongoing maintenance and service. Work with a company that is going to be around a year from the time you employ them, too many customers I have met have been left in limbo because the company or individual they were dealing with has gone bust or skipped the country to leave you in the middle of nowhere.

In summary there are a number of aspects to take into consideration before making your web developer choice. I am confident this article with the above 10 tips will help you qualify the best company to deal with for your new web project.

The majority of the 10 tips should already be covered by your chosen development company, but it does not hurt you to double-check. I highly recommend you ask your chosen company questions based on my 10 tips above, this will help establish them as the right business to deal with.

All successful web projects are a result of planning and evaluating, failing to plan and evaluate your development choices could mean failure of your website.

Choose wisely and approach everything smartly, remember if you put in the leg/foot work to start with, you will reap the benefits later.

Social media websites are becoming increasingly instrumental in the field of SEO and a digital agency should boast experts who are capable of managing your social media campaign and capitalising on the SEO benefits that a well managed social media strategy can provide. A digital agency will set up various social media campaigns on the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

Not all digital agencies will be aware of just how advantageous a well managed campaign can be and for this reason, it is imperative to opt for a digital agency that can showcase how they have improved their clients rankings over a period. There has clearly been a substantial shift towards social media websites in recent times and they are becoming a vital cog within SEO circles.

Ways A Digital Agency Should Boost Your Presence

There are many avenues that can be pursued when using web 2.0 websites as an SEO tool and understanding how best to follow these routes is something that most businesses will leave to a full service web agency because they will be able to devise a strategy which yields the best results. Just some of the things a team of SEO experts will ordinarily do to make the most of such sites include:

• Consider all the uses – It can be utilised for more than just marketing and PR purposes and a good digital agency will be well aware of this fact. Skilled SEO experts will also use these websites for branding, customer service and various other endeavors to ensure that they are making the most of the sites.

• Measuring Success – There is no point developing a social media strategy and then not measuring the results it provides. A digital agency is likely to have the experts on staff who can spot patterns, trends and successful elements of a social media campaign and will tweak it as and when in order to make its performance as strong as possible.

• Professionalism – If you allow your campaign to be run by a digital agency, the chances are that it will be run much more professionally and with more attention to detail. A social media strategy should be crafted with the end user in mind and this is something that a skilled full service web agency will be adept at.

Picking a digital agency is something which should be based on a number of different factors and chief amongst these will be their capacity to provide effective search engine optimisation (SEO) for your newly crafted website.

If you have ever had an involvement with a website design company, you may well have experienced a great deal of mis-communication, mis-interpretation and missed deadlines.

What seems like the simplest of notions, turns into a 6 month headache.

As an integral part of a web design agency, i would like to offer up some suggestions as to why this can happen.

Let me firstly give you the web agencies argument, then i will reveal how this whole sorry process can be avoided and save you hundreds if not thousands of pounds at the same time.

An agency works to a spec document, usually prepared by the client or as a joint effort. A paper sitemap is created so we can see the site hierarchy and what links to where.

When this phase is complete, our web designers will begin to create a graphical interface to display your content in the best possible way.

This is where the first MAJOR problem occurs.

As professional web designers, we will proceed to create a website that delivers your business or personal goals, this has a direct impact on site design and layout.

Let me give you an example:

If we are tasked with creating an ecommerce site for selling a product, we will create a homepage where the visitor is guided into the sales process, every click they make takes them further down the path to the sale, after all, an ecommerce website should sell right?

Not according to some clients no, far better in their eyes, to have a beautifully sculpted landing page showcasing the latest and greatest web 2.0 or flash movie intro, culminating in the inevitable ‘click here to enter’ button, centred on the page.

To hell with search engine optimisation, they want their site to look the best!

This is always a bad start to a client / designer relationship and sets alarm bells ringing at web design hq with distant cries of ‘Oh no. we’ve got another one..’ emanating from the design office.

Sure, if you’re a big brand looking to release and market a new product then knock yourself out, but for Joe Bloggs paperclip sales? I think not.

This brings me to my second point – logo’s.

Do you really think that your company is SO important to the end user that they MUST be subjected to the monstrously oversized logo you are forcing the design team to integrate. What’s more, after we submit the site to you for initial sign off – 99% percent of the time we are sat waiting for the ‘can you just make the logo a bit bigger’ phone call.

Your site should be about the product or service, it’s not about your logo, keep this in mind next time you think half a page is ‘reasonable’ logo space.

It’s amazing how many clients play at ‘designer’ once the ball starts rolling.

So after wasting days or weeks on design tweaks that detract from your business goals, we finally submit and give you what you want, a site based on ‘this great site i saw on xyz.com’, a site i should mention that is already old fashioned and already out of date. We work for the future, not the past.

Just to point out that i’m not ranting here, this is cold hard fact, drawn from actual daily experiences.

The next stage can be even more disastrous, the integrating of content.

Now we are getting to the nuts and bolts of the project, the promise of content and imagery suddenly seems like a distant dream. We hear week upon week that the content is nearly finished, but it isn’t, it isn’t even started.

Many clients are under the illusion that writing content is easy, until they begin the task. Nobody likes writing content. Every word or paragraph is important and can be the difference between delivering the right or wrong message to your audience.

It’s not unusual for a web design agency to wait 6 months for content to materialise, it’s even less unusual for us to be asked to write the content. Why not just ask us to do this in the first place?

All the procrastrination is costing money.

For those that do bite the bullet and write the content themselves, they become lost in the Sitemap, many convince themselves that the sitemap is actually incorrect and that a new one should be generated?

This has massive implications, the web site design could well have to be broken down and re-started in order to accommodate the ‘small changes’ to the structure.

It’s not unusual to re-start a project several times, as the real aims of a website finally dawn on the client. By this time, the ever humble web agency is so brow beaten, that they simply agree, in the hope that the project will at some stage be put to bed.

I can fully empathise with the client, i realise that intervention isn’t intentionally done to upset the applecart, it’s just a lack if education and i don’t mean that in an offensive way.

To really drive this point home, imagine that you are a roofing contractor, highly specialised and having gone through years of professional training. You are half way through fitting my new fandangled roof when i casually pop outside and tell you that i think it will look better if you put it on upside down.

Now here’s the good part.

There is a new breed of web design agency surfacing. One where the client is rewarded for allowing the agency to perform their task without interruptions.
The client is asked to create a list of page titles and create content for those pages in advance. The also collect and imagery they wish to use. Design wise they provide a suggested colour scheme and a list of website they find inspiring (for design cues). Lastly they provide a list of keywords that will shape the tone of the site i.e fun, modern, contemporary, corporate.

All this material is submitted to the agency and that is the last input the client has.
The agency can then use the submitted material to create a fully functional website within a very short timeframe.

The client has to trust that both his submitted information is correct and that the agency will do a professional job.
The clients reward for this is a huge cost saving, sometimes thousands of pounds on a single project.

The agency is allowed to provide a professional service with a lightning fast turnaround time.
Now in the real world, there will always be clients out there who want to control the web design process, but for those who recognise that the job should be left to the experts, the rewards are multiple.
It certainly pays to be prepared doesn’t it?

Plenty of startup companies are seeking their web presence through a simple website or an interactive web portal. To accomplish the web development task they try to find the resources on internet. They search for resources using keywords like freelance web developer, freelance web development or freelance web designers. Either they end up seeing some blog of freelancer or they reach to the freelance heaven websites like rentacoder, getacoder, getafreelancer, elance or odesk. Such sites have millions of cheap freelancers registered with them. You may put a project and you can get as many as 50-100 bids for your project in a day. This sounds fascinating initially but it’s just a beginning of process. The trouble starts now. Here are few difficulties you will face at initial stage.

1. You have overwhelming bids that makes the choice difficult for you.

2. Every one of them tells you that they are the best, but hardly few of them are actually telling the truth.

3. You may not find just one freelance web developer meets all your needs, Mr. A meets 50% matching requirements and Mr. B and Mr. C meets 25% each, that increases your troubles.

SO finally you selected someone with all your agreements on price and estimate, now you may see the second largest pool of difficulties

1. The communication is a major issue, the freelancer does not reply emails on time and neither do they remain online all the day because they have their full time jobs elsewhere (that jobs pay the full time income)

2. The freelancer is a lone person but the project of web development needs different skills like project requirement analysis, design the website mockup, HTML conversion, programming in PHP or.Net, quality test and delivery. Normally not one person does all. This invites problem #3

3. The freelancer either asks you to manage other resources for him or he goes and finds other freelancers to help him; that comes on higher price. So you waste lot of time while your selected freelance web designer is busy finding help for him.

4. As I said in point #1, most of the freelancers have their full time jobs, such jobs demand lot of time and energy, so freelance web designers or developers work on odd hours or they just do not work on some days when they are busy with their full time jobs. Such behavior causes further delay to your project delivery.

5. You may come across various excuses for not delivering of your projects, some common excuses are “I am not well since few days”, some emotional excuses like “My mother/father/daughter/wife is not well so I am in hospital”. Such excuses are emotional blackmailing techniques that can make you believe that the freelancer is in trouble while he is actually trying to buy some more time.

6. Most of the Freelance web developers are over loaded with work because of their cheap hourly rates. Such overloading can make you suffer the delay in your web development project. That increase more frustration.

7. The major problem you could come across is that the freelancer disappears after you paid him advance money for your project. Certain freelancers have many accounts created on odesk, elance, getacoder, rentacoder, getafreelancer kind of websites, so they would stop responding you and neither do they will return your initial money.

So your plan of saving money could end up losing money and time, losing time is more expensive than losing money.

How do you prevent this, here are simple reasons to select a small web development company compared to a freelance web developer.

1. The company has long term plan, so web development companies are professional.

2. Company has many resources for web design, web development, quality testing and deployment so your project never suffers a delay.

3. Company has a legal name, legal offices so web development companies can sign a contract with you, a freelancer never signs a contract or signing contract with freelancer has no meaning.

4. A web development company has many back resources so even if some developer or designer does not show up, the company can replace them with other developers, your work never suffer.

5. A web development company takes money on milestones, so your money and project both are secure.

6. Most important point is communication. You can get a good communicating people in web development companies because the manager is always a well experienced person; he takes all responsibilities of problems and payments.

Above all its peace of mind when you work with web development companies, it comes at little extra cost but with lot of amenities as described above.

Choice is yours, select a freelance web designer and ruin your web development project or select a web development company and run a successful web based business.

VB.Net or Visual Basic.Net is an object-oriented computer programming language which is highly used by web programmers to develop web application over the .NET framework. Introduced by Microsoft, this programming language is a powerful tool for developing programs using .NET technology. Today, millions of programmers use VB.net for developing web and desktop based applications. By using this computer language, web programmers can easily develop applications for wireless, internet-enabled handheld devices such as mobile phones.

Till date, about four versions of Visual Basic.Net have been introduced by the Microsoft. And, understanding the technical aspects of these versions is not an easy task. In order to develop web-based applications over VB.Net platform, the web programmers should have thorough knowledge about ASP and C# computer languages.

If you want to develop web applications using VB.Net platform for your website, then it is necessary to hire VB.Net developers from reliable web application development companies. Some offshore web development companies in India have pool of experienced developers to deliver web-based solutions on the .NET framework. The dedicated web developers have the ability to meet the business requirements of their clients in least possible time.

Some of the major advantages of hiring VB.Net developers from offshore web development companies are mentioned below:

• They are expert in developing web applications based on visual basic for different domains and verticals.

• Offshore web developers use their technical, analytical and creative skills to offer quality web-based solutions to their clients.

• Offshore companies have team of programmers that are well trained in many technological aspects of visual basic development. By hiring them for your project, you can minimize the administration cost required to hire a full-time professional.

• The projects are not only delivered on time but are also cost-effective.

• Clients can have direct communication with the professional web developers via telephone calls, e-mails, video chats etc to specify their requirements as and when required.

• Offshore web developers provide regular working status on the assigned projects and help their clients to monitor the status progress of the project.

VB.Net programming language has been developed with improved visual designers, increased application performance and a powerful integrated development environment (IDE). It includes productive features for developing robust web applications easily and quickly. This computer language provides full support for database programming and help programmers to develop games, websites, business applications and many more products.

Are you in need of qualified and experienced visual basic.net developers? Then, opt for hiring developers from reliable offshore web development companies. They will fulfill your technological needs and will provide bug-free web applications according to your business requirements and budget.